Articles by Rulof Burger
Reservation wages found in surveys can be very misleading
The responses of unemployed workers to the typical survey question about their ‘lowest acceptable wages’ are susceptible to error and overestimation – particularly for people in persistent joblessness. Studies using only the responses to the standard question may incorrectly conclude that vulnerable workers are unemployed because they tend to price themselves out of employment – while in fact their responses are just unreliable and distorted indications of their true reservation wages. Alternative questions would give more reliable results.
What caused the increase in unemployment in the late 1990s? Were education policies partly responsible?
In the late 1990s the Department of Education restricted the re-enrolment of over-aged learners and the number of times underperforming learners could repeat a grade. This was intended to reduce the number of learners in the school system, but may have contributed to a sudden increase in measured unemployment. Of the 2.3 million increase in the number of unemployed between 1997 and 2003, up to 900 000 may be due to unintended effects of these policies which brought hidden (youth) unemployment into the open.